There’s been a great deal of concern around here about the effort to prepare the US military for the full repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), and I’ve had a few words of my own regarding how long the process might take.

There was a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee last Thursday that had all four Services represented; with one exception these were the same Service Chiefs that were testifying last December when the bill to set the repeal process in motion was still a piece of prospective legislation.

At that time there was concern that the “combat arms” of the Marines and the Army were going to be impacted in a negative way by the transition to “open service”; the Commandant of the Marine Corps and the Army’s Chief of Staff were the most outspoken in confirming that such concerns exist within the Pentagon as well.

We now have more information to report-including the increasing desperation of some of our Republican friends-and if you ask me, I think things might be better than we thought.

Much of the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is schedule to go into effect in July, which means that between now and then, attempts by House Republicans to limit that authority are going to intensify. This week’s episode of 90 Second Summaries examines some of those attempts.

Though these bills are unlikely to see real action on their own, look for a measure of this sort to be included as a rider on some must-pass piece of legislation.

If an election does not have a candidate who a voter sees as being worthy of support, not voting is a positive, if not a required, action. In today’s political climate, who would you actually vote for for President? Let’s take a look:

Obama – At least this time you’ll know what you’re voting for. I didn’t vote for him. I won’t vote for him this time.

Ummm…it looks like the Dems aren’t going to have anybody else running (well, supposedly Randall Terry is going to run against Obama in the primaries).

What about the Republicans?

Ron Paul – Paul’s interesting, but as with other Libertarians liberty is in the eye of the beholder. Stray outside of the particular Libertarian liberty and you’ll find yourself not enjoying the protection of a Libertarian society.

The rest – Bwahahahahahahahahahaha

So, you’ll have a choice of the joker Obama and a Republican joker. You’ll have a choice of a bad President (Obama) and a probable worse Republican. So, as always it seems, you’ll have a choice between bad and worse.

Knowingly voting for bad is, well…voting for bad. Knowingly. Doing so, in my view, is not positive. It’s bad. And, what’s worse is that the act of voting for the bad just continues to encourage the bad. I suppose voting for the bad is better than voting for the worse, but voting for the bad is still voting for the bad.

I don’t see voting for the bad over the worse as being worthwhile, so given the choice, I won’t vote (where I live, you can’t write in a candidate unless they are a declared write-in candidate, and I don’t see anybody running as an independent who’s worth voting for). Perhaps someone will come out of the woodwork who’s worth voting for. So far, I haven’t seen anybody worth wasting the time on.

CA TreeHugger writes this morning at dKos that “Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.”

According to an article at guardian.co.uk, the law will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

The law will enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”.

The epicentre of the quake was in Fukushima prefecture, and struck at a depth of just 10km (six miles).

It came as Japan said it was extending the evacuation zone around the nuclear plant because of radiation concerns.

The cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were damaged in last month’s disaster. Workers have been struggling to prevent several reactors from overheating, and avert a large-scale release of radiation.

The basic problem was revealed by the NRC’s (Reactor Safety Team), which drafted a report that combined the collective assessment of nuclear physicists and engineers around the world. Contrary to the rosy press releases by the utility, this report revealed the true depth of the nuclear accident.

When emissions of toxic misinformation at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor #3 exceeded 100,000 times the normal corporate background, X-ray diagrams of the site revealed a previously unsuspected source.

We hear a lot about carbon these days as a greenhouse gas, sort of giving carbon a bad name. While I agree that excessive carbon dioxide emissions from the wanton burning of fossil fuels is a bad thing, it is not the fault of the carbon, but rather the fault of civilization for being unwise in how fossil carbon deposits are used.

As a matter of fact, without some carbon dioxide release, we would all starve because atmospheric carbon dioxide is the sole source of carbon in the food chain, thanks to the photosynthetic ability of green plants. But this topic has been discussed in many places, sometimes in this regular series. We shall discuss other properties of carbon and why it is essential to life as we understand life, and perhaps all life yet undiscovered.

The biggest mistake I see many make when trying to sell Obama to the independents and liberals and progressives Obama has driven away over the past 2 1/2 years with his bipartisan coddling of and enabling of republicans is to call the prospects stupid, and tell them buying the product is the only way they can stop being stupid, apparently thinking the prospects will immediately reach for their wallets and say “where do I sign”?

Of course, that result only happens in salespeople’s dreams – and is the reason 90 percent of people who go into sales never make any money at the job.

There is also a (real life) tried and true technique in sales and marketing that Obama supporters could try: the top sales producers in any industry constantly critique themselves and ask themselves “If I’m not getting the results I want to get, what am I doing to get the results I am getting?“

(Wanted this to be days’ earlier, but it wasn’t possible. So, TMC’s diary here seemed a perfect place to comment, but then the comment became very long . . . . so!)

While traveling to an appointment last Thursday (April 7th), I listened to David Sirota, filling in for Thom Hartmann.* Sirota began by talking about Pentagon horrendous wastes, even to the extent that the Pentagon has an Entertainment Division. Essentially, the Pentagon puts up money to back films about war and for war and does everything, with money included, to discourage film makers from making films that are against war. He said he has detailed that information in his book, “Back to Our Future.”

Several veterans (one of VietNam era) called in speaking about the excesses of Pentagon spending and blatant waste. Both discussed Halliburton and Blackwater, in particular.